As the mileage on a tire increases, the sidewall rubber surfaces often become dull and unattractive. This is due to various causes including wind, weather, sunlight, scratching, abrasion from dirt, and other chemical and physical reactions. Many products are available today on the market for tire dressing usage to address these adverse effects. Many of these tire dressing products restore older appearance from a dull, weathered appearance to a shiny, bright, and like-new condition. For example, conventionally a dispersion of the silicone fluids in petroleum distillates, or a conventional oil in water silicone emulsion system with milky or opaque appearance are often used to restore the attractive, bright, shiny, and like-new appearance on the tire surface. Typically, conventional tire dressing formulas for dressing and appearance applications are products containing both high viscosity and low viscosity silicone fluids blended in petroleum distillates or products containing silicone emulsions prepared in aqueous systems with a milky white and opaque appearance. When applied to a tire surface, the silicone composition forms a coating which develops a desired shiny appearance due to the unique structure of the silicone layer formed on the tire surface.
A solution or dispersion of silicone oil or wax in an organic solvent and an aqueous emulsion prepared therefrom with the aid of a surfactant are also generally employed as tire dressing agents. However, while these polishing agents impart good gloss and acceptable water repellency to tires, they are readily stripped from the tire surface by rain and dust so that the effects are relatively transitory or short-lived.
In addition, aqueous-based tire dressings typically show poor adherence to the surface of tires because of the low surface energy of the surface relative to the surface energy of the aqueous compositions. As a result, most of the existing tire dressing products on the market use an organic solvent-based system, with silicone fluids dispersed in the hydrocarbon solvent, having a lower surface energy than the tire surface.
Improved adhesion has been obtained with silicone based tire dressing compositions that include a silicone microemulsion and a wetting agent, as for example detailed in U.S. Pat. No. 7,074,262. However, this product and other conventional products tend to streak when applied to tire surfaces having residual silicone on them. Such streaking not only detracts from the visual appearance the tire dressing, but also owing to the lack of tire dressing coating uniformity tends to limit not only the gloss but the coating operational lifetime on the surface of a tire.
Thus, there exists a need for a tire dressing composition that is amenable to a spray application to a tire surface that overcomes the streaking associated with conventional tire dressing compositions. There also exists a need for a process to apply such a composition to provide a high gloss protective dressing coating to a tire surface.